Front/browse + character listing updates

Hi all! Hope the weekend's treating everyone well.

The preliminary look at the new listings feature is out which includes some changes to the front page. I think the listings need some love so I'm hoping this can kick off some discussion for further improvements that we can look towards in the future -- accordingly, some of this may be subject to change depending on feedback (will provide a link to a feedback thread at the bottom for anyone who wants to pitch in!).

📚 Background —

Copy pasted from the last changelog from the 24th of September:

Some users are probably aware already, but we've been receiving an increasing number of complaints recently regarding non-character uploads on the listings (codes, resources/bases/assets, commission ads, purge ads, games/event ads, species info sheets, etc) and decreased visibility of character listings, as well as the difficulty surrounding upload visibility due to competition on the popular submissions page. When we started un-listing non-character submissions, we received more complaints from users who were actively using these resources and wanted them to stay up, so it doesn't seem like removing these has been a happy solution.

Due to the feedback we've received, we're going to try adding in a new listing types to accomodate for resources/ads, which I thought would also be a good time to create a separate listing for code profiles. The idea is that when submitting a character/non-character, you can select it to be uploaded to one of several listing types (Character, Code, Asset/Resource, Ad), and each user can customise which listings they're interested in seeing on the front page and in search. Since it feels like users want this feature in sooner than later, it's likely that I'll push out a simple prototype in the upcoming week or two just for initial use and feedback, and then make changes according to user suggestions.

🛠️ Changes made —

• Front page changes:
  • You can now find a at the top right of the front page, where you can update your front page settings.
  • You can pick from four blocks: Feed, Popular (it's back!), Random, Recent
    • The popular listings were previously removed from the front page years ago due to negativity in the community targeting popular characters. We'll do our best to keep an eye on this and do what we can to help with The Algorithm, but please be good to each other!
  • You can additionally pick and choose what character categories you’d like to be shown on the front page (Character, HTML/CSS, Resource, Ad/Service)
• Character browse/search pages:
  • These also now have selectors for character categories
• Character creation:
  • You can pick which category you’d like to have a character submitted under
  • We’ve updated our “Listing” drop down to be a checkbox to give a bit more clarity regarding what it does (this was causing some confusion for users who were unsure what the difference was between the regular Listing, and the Trade Listing)
• Character update (edit profile):
  • You can update an existing character’s category (if your character has ever previously been unlisted due to a spam report, this will immediately and automatically release the lock; after updating the category you should then be able to freely list/unlist the character again)
    • Update: Changing the category of an existing character has now been moved under the "Advanced" section to make it harder to accidentally change, thanks for your feedback! 
  • You can change a character into a non-character, and a non-character into a non-character, but you can’t change a non-character into a character. This is to prevent people from abusing the listings to fave farm, then later converting the farmed profile back into a character
    
    

Feedback thread can be found here; thanks for anyone who has time to contribute: https://toyhou.se/~forums/14.suggestions-bugs/340737.-front-browse-search-feedback-thread

Thanks all as always for your patience 🙇